Prague’s Václav Havel Airport has spent the past two weeks trialling a redesigned passenger-flow model to cope with the EU’s forthcoming Entry/Exit System (EES), which is already running in pilot mode at the Czech border crossing. In a joint press release issued on 23 September 2026, the airport, the Ministry of the Interior and the Czech Police confirmed that early data show wait-times for third-country nationals have dropped by up to 35 percent at peak periods. Under the new workflow, travellers complete biometric self-service registration at additional kiosks that have been moved closer to the arrival gates. A “Red Team” of multilingual staff now directs passengers step-by-step, and families or elderly travellers are funnelled to assisted lanes. The airport has also widened corridors leading to passport control and is experimenting with pre-departure registration that would allow airlines to transmit EES data before landing. Interior Minister Lubomír Metnar told reporters that the goal is to create a process that is “resilient even on the busiest summer Fridays.” He added that the ministry is prepared to allocate extra immigration officers and mobile enrolment stations once the EES becomes mandatory across the EU, currently slated for late 2026. Industry groups such as the Czech Association of Hotels and Restaurants welcomed the move, noting that easier formalities are essential for keeping Prague competitive as a meetings-and-events destination. For corporate travel managers the main takeaway is that third-country business visitors will still need to budget extra minutes for biometric capture, but bottlenecks should ease as the airport fine-tunes the system. Companies may want to brief travellers about completing the kiosk process in one go—statistics show incomplete transactions remain the chief source of delay. Airlines serving Prague have already started adding EES how-to videos to in-flight entertainment and plan to trial digital pre-registration on select routes this winter.
Source: Prague Airport press release
